The Rise of Interpretive Journalism

Abstract

Interpretive journalism is a journalistic style, characterized by reporters expressing their opinion, speculating about the future or explaining why something happened, without referring to verifiable facts or statements from news sources. Previous research upon this phenomenon is rather scattered, and inconclusive about the mechanisms underlying the presence of this journalistic style. This study aims to address both shortcomings by investigating newspaper coverage on coalition negotiations in Belgium. Conducting a quantitative, longitudinal content analysis, the evolution of interpretive journalism is studied between 1985 and 2014. Results show a remarkably strong, almost linear increase in the amount of interpretation in newspaper articles over a period of 29 years. Apart from the structural evolution in the media landscape that might cause this trend to occur, contextual determinants differing from one coalition formation to another turn out to be relevant as well. While interpretive journalism is on the rise, this is especially so when considering lengthy, difficult negotiations. This finding emphasizes the importance of contextual determinants—information accessibility in this case—in explaining journalistic trends.

KEYWORDS:

• interpretive journalism
• opinion journalism
• explanatory journalism
• longitudinal content analysis
• newspaper coverage
• coalition negotiations

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wants to thank M²P and especially Stefaan Walgrave for the extensive help and useful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Flemish is the Dutch language as spoken in Flanders, the northern (and largest) part of Belgium.

2. No differences were found between the popular and quality newspaper with regard to the amount of journalistic interpretation

3. It is useful to use separate indicators to measure interpretive journalism, as the scale reliability is only .41. This means the measure is an additive index indicating that interpretive journalism consists of different aspects that together constitute a distinct journalistic style.

4. In the reliability test, journalists’ tone was coded as either neutral, positive, negative or ambivalent. Differences between the two coders taking the reliability test mainly occurred in deciding whether a certain term was ambivalent or positive/negative. However, in the final analysis included in this paper, both positive/negative and ambivalent references are seen as opposing a neutral style of writing, and are thus taken together. This is why the slightly lower alpha for the use of value-laden terms should not be given too much weight.